What in the world is Mean Absolute Deviation?

Probably my least favorite lesson was when we started the unit on "Measures of Central Tendency and Spread". This was all about finding the range, mean, median and mode of a set data. After we went over the definition of all the new vocab words in this unit and what exactly were we measuring, we moved on to Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD). The definition we had in class was that "it's measuring the average distance from the mean of the spread of the data", so basically saying how far away is each data point from the mean. We started off this lesson with a packet that had us create a histogram on a set of data. From that information we looked for the mean, median and range and used that information to find the MAD of the data. This was done by subtracting each numerical value of the graph from the mean and in result we got the MAD!

Okay so it doesn't sound as bad, but I struggled a lot with understanding how to do it. However, the packet given to us was a good way to start off this lesson and helped us start on the right foot. Luckily, there's a formula to find the MAD, but to get there you have to find the mean, median and range of a data set, so better to start off with a packet like this, rather than showing them the formula first. I found a good math website where student can go practice finding MAD, and even the rest of the measures of central tendency and spread, and it shows you step by step of how they got their answer!

An example of my graph and how I got the MAD.